Debate: Is the media strangling New Zealand leadership?
As part of New Zealand Leadership Week 2007, Excelerator held a debate critically assessing the media's track record in helping or hindering the country's leadership.
Are tall poppies really mown down with rapacious glee or does the media sustain and promote good leadership and reserve its vitriol for those examples of bad leadership that truly deserve all they receive?
Opening addresses
Negating the moot:
 | Cate Honore Brett Cate edits the country's only national broadsheet newspaper, the Sunday Star-Times. She has been a multiple award winning feature writer for North & South magazine; published an academic thesis on the interaction between the criminal justice system and the media based on Blenheim's Operation Tam, and climbed rapidly through the management ranks after returning to newspapers in 1998 as features editor and then deputy editor/weekend editor of The Press in Christchurch. She moved to Auckland in 2003 with her husband and youngest son to take up the editorship of the Star-Times under Fairfax. |
 | Deborah Hill Cone Deborah is a former news editor of financial newspaper National Business Review . Her investigative reporting and feature writing has been recognised with five Qantas Media Awards. In 1997 Deborah was a Reuter Foundation Fellow at Green College, Oxford and in 2005 she won the Australasian Citigroup Excellence in Journalism award, a scholarship to attend the Columbia University Postgraduate School of Journalism in New York City. Deborah writes a weekly column for the New Zealand Herald's The Business section and freelances for a wide variety of publications. |
Affirming the moot:
 | Gavin Ellis Gavin is a media consultant with more than 40 years experience in journalism. Former editor-in-chief of the New Zealand Herald, he was also chair of the New Zealand Media Freedom Committee and recipient of the 2005 Commonwealth Astor Award for Press Freedom. He was a trustee of the Knowledge Wave initiative and is currently a trustee of the Asia New Zealand Foundation. Gavin is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auckland. |
 | Lester Levy Lester is the Chief Executive of Excelerator: New Zealand Leadership Institute. For more background information about Lester, click here.
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Summing up
 | Debate Chair - Duncan Petrie Duncan is Professor of Film and Head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. He previously worked at the University of Exeter, where he established the Bill Douglas Centre, a public museum and research resource dedicated to the history and prehistory of the cinema, and the British Film Institute where he was a research officer. His books include Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry (1991), The British Cinematographer (1996), Screening Scotland (2000), Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (2004) and Shot in New Zealand: The Art and Craft of the Kiwi Cinematographer to be published by Random House this October. Duncan has been a member of the Scottish Screen Lottery Panel, South West Screen and The South West Film and Television Archive. |
The rebuttals:
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Q & A from the audience and closing:
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